In this Capstone project for the Photo Tourist you will implement a Ruby on Rails web application that makes use of both a relational and NoSQL database for the backend and expose the data through services to the Internet using Web services and a responsive user interface operating in a browser from a desktop and mobile device. You will have a chance to revisit and apply what you have learned in our previous courses to build and deploy a fully functional web application to the cloud accessible to your co-workers, future employers, friends, and family.
In developing the Photo Tourist web application, you will get to work with different data types and data access scenarios (e.g., fielded data display and update, image upload/download, text search, access controlled information) to provide your users the ability to show off their photos and information from trips they have taken and to seek out photos and information from trips taken by others. Using the application you develop, your users will be able to
• Create an account
• Upload and download photos to the site and make them accessible to others
• Provide descriptions of trips and photos that others can read
• Organize photos by location and trip,
• Find photos based on location
• Find photos based on text searches of descriptions
• Locate the place where the photo was taken on a map

From the lesson

SPA Development Setup

In this module, you will develop an AngularJS web application for the purposes of managing a resource hosted by a Rails server. As a part of that, you will learn the details of the Rails Asset Pipeline for hosting web applications, key features to address when moving from development to production, and different deployment options that you have within this course. You will complete an end-to-end AngularJS/Rails application to manage the resource on the Rails server you developed and deployed as a part of module one (1). This application will consist of AngularJS 1.x, UI-Router, and ngResource modules as well as a sample service, directive, controller, and web page to manage the resource. You will learn the details of the Rails Asset Pipeline as an option for deploying web assets like AngularJS web applications and what features it provides and how to conform to its conventions to get those features. Novice and intermediate developers are encouraged to use the Asset Pipeline approach in this module and throughout the course for simplicity and consistency with the examples in follow-on modules as this will be the development approach used by all follow-on modules. You will optionally learn how to leverage node package manager, bower, and gulp to establish an external development environment that parallels many of the capabilities provided by Asset Pipeline (e.g., minification to reduce bandwidth requirements and concatenation to reduce the number of separate server HTTP connections). You may leverage this environment to form a deployment to Github, like performed during courses four (4) and five (5) except with deployment considerations addressed. Although there is a functional gulpfile developed during the module, you are encouraged to treat this as an optional topic. Additionally, you can optionally learn how to use a hybrid of external development and Rails by using Rails as a web server and deploying your web application to the public directory and forming a single development tree and deployment artifact to Heroku. Like the pure external development approach, you are encouraged to treat this approach as an optional topic.